Free Stone Seeds by Jo; Ely

life and death.” Mamma Zeina taps the curved end of her nose with one stubby finger. “Drag an orange sack home, Zorry, and with your edge farm friends and neighbours looking at you, pitying or else just plain evasive. Just like you’re already dead.” Mamma Zeina eyes Zorry. “That’s what we’re up against. It all begins and ends with Gaddys.”
    Mamma Zeina gathers up her skirts and slowly walks away from Zorry. Zorry notices her pull distractedly on the glove on her right hand. Zorry briefly wonders why Mamma Zeina wears it. It seems to Zorry that the old woman doesn’t do much without a reason.
    And now Gaddys closes her square right hand around her glass. It’s crystal, delicately carved with ancient species of flowers and so fragile looking that you’d think, looking at her heavy hand, that she would crush the glass between those smooth, hard fingers. Zorry finds herself watching Gaddys’ hands with a strange fascination. But they’re just the regular perfumed hands of a lady of the Flowers Fund, Zorry shakes herself. A little more thick-knuckled than most, perhaps, and the nails made to mimic cat claws, extend and retract in the latest Bavarnican fashion. Zorry looks down. Her own long fingered hands are hard wearing, callused. Nails bitten down to the quick.
    Exhaustion rolls over Zorry. Sound of her own heart thumping in her ears.
    Her eyes close for a moment.
    There’s a silence in the room as Gaddys rises. The senseof breath held. No need for Gaddys to cough or tap her glass, Zorry blinks and tries to concentrate. She notices the fabric of Gaddys’ dress strain against her large muscular body. And now the table is silent. The quiet seems to emanate from Gaddys, seep upward from her skirts, Zorry thinks. Like that moment when the dust comes over the top of the killing forest, drifting westward whenever an edge farmhouse is bombed.
    Gaddys’ hair is shaven at the sides in the latest fashion, with a spiral starting from just over her ears and making the top of her head look like a coil pot or a nest of snakes, depending on your disposition so that even the OneFolk childur from this, Bavarnica’s show village (and childur, in Bavarnica, is the loose and rather insulting name meaning young people) but they can recall her hairdo every time they look at the rusting spiral water dispenser in the school canteen. Her hair is called to mind by the caterpillar twists and turns of the yellow seams running down the outside of the general’s energiser by the killing forest fences. Then there’s the twisted rusting pump of the school’s generator. Or the water canteen in the OneFolk childurs’ playground, which the boldest of the OneFolk childur call Gaddys and throw small stones at. Gaddys’ hairpiece is quite a show stopper, even by the standards of the OneFolks’ show village. It’s how she announces her presence. It’s her brand, Zorry thinks.
    Zorry sinks farther back into the space beside the window, afternoon is turning into evening. She feels the shadows slip around her. Curfew is coming for the Sinta farms beneath the great house. Everyone indoors when the general switches off his mechanised sun, and the old sun is allowed to cast its dim, last rays.
    Zorry presses her back into the corner. She is clutching an empty platter. Holds it to her heart unconsciously, like a shield.
    When she looks down she notices that her right hand is shaking.
    Takes her a while to see that the Egg Boy Antek is back. Glances at her from underneath his helmet. Looks away again quickly.
    And then she follows his eye. Notices the small escaping critter is still on the move, it pops out of the side of the powdered wig of one of the grander ladies at Gaddys’ end of the table. It’s looking jittery and flustered, antennae swivelling furiously, and now ducks and hops on and off the curling beard of the ancient looking man to the right of